Wednesday, 14 September 2011

Contested Indian Identity in Contemporary South Africa

One hundred and fifty years ago the first indentured Indians
were brought to South Africa to work in sugar cane fields. They were soon
joined by ‘passenger Indians’ who came of their own free will to trade.

The indentured Indians were not the first Indians to be
brought to South Africa. On the contrary, a significant number of Indians were
brought to the Cape Colony as slaves, but their descendents became part of the
groups classified as White and Coloured under apartheid.

But, of course, the indentured Indians and the merchants
that followed them were contained as a separate ‘race group’ by apartheid
social engineering, and so developed a particular Indian identity. It is their
experiences and achievements, which are being memorialised and celebrated in
various events and publications being prepared to celebrate the 150th
anniversary of the arrival of the first indentured Indian workers in South
Africa.

As the brilliant photographer and historian Omar Badsha
recently observed in an important intervention in the Sunday Times, these
attempts at memorialisation are taking very different trajectories.

It has been suggested that in common with other minorities,
many Indians have responded to the perceived or potential ethnic chauvinism in
South Africa by turning away from the nation towards a narrower conception of
ethnic and religious identity. There is certainly a lot of truth in this
observation, but we should recall that the Rainbow Nation ideal of the Mandela
Presidency was already an ideal of a multi-racial rather than a non-racial
society.

No doubt the role played by Mandela was an important one. A
country as scarred as South Africa was after such a traumatic history, surely
needed a project of nation building and social cohesion. However, the problem
was that we had embraced a culture of multi-racialism rather than one of
non-racialism. Experiments in popular non-racialism happened in the Black
Consciousness and trade union movements but not much attention was paid to
this.

The tradition of non-racialism has largely been abandoned in
post-apartheid South Africa. It has even, to some degree, been written out of
history. Young Indian students know more about the ethnic politics of the Natal
and Transvaal Indian Congresses and nothing at all about the non-racialism of
the Black Consciousness and Trade Union movements. It is essential that we recuperate the memory
of this non-racial politics and celebrate those who committed their lives to
it.

The abandonment of the tradition of non-racialism has led to
a situation where it is regularly assumed that Indians are a homogenous group
whose support can be delivered by self proclaimed elite leaders. This is
nonsensical. What do some of the elite
leaders have in common with grassroots activists who organise against evictions
and disconnections in communities?

The fact is that the Indian community is deeply divided by
class, with rich and poor living in totally different worlds. Poor Indians
living in shacks have almost nothing in common with rich Indians living in
mansions. There are also deep divisions in terms of religion, language and
caste. And there are deep political divisions within the Indian community.

For a start, the attempts to portray the Indian community as
uniformly committed to the anti-apartheid struggle are deliberately dishonest.
As in all communities there was heroic resistance, outright collaboration and a
large amount of political apathy. But it really is important that we begin to
be open about this fact. We also need to be open about the fact that not all of
the Indian opposition to apartheid was constituted on the basis of a popular
non-racialism.

Furthermore there has long been a taboo on openly admitting
the prevalence of anti-African racism within the Indian community. When African
people raise this issue, Indian intellectuals and self appointed community
leaders rush in to shut the debate down. But it is a debate that needs to be
had. Some young Indian intellectuals who have been raising these debates need
to be celebrated for their courage in surfacing them directly and fearlessly.
If we don’t discuss Indian racism we can’t deal with it.

There are many Indians who courageously fought apartheid
racism, and many Indians who in their more ordinary day-to-day lives exist far
from the poison of racism. But it is also true that there are many Indians who
seem to think that racism is a White disease and who, unthinkingly, engage in
shockingly racist behaviour towards African people on a daily basis. Even
within the community there is, in some quarters, a real prejudice against
darker skinned Indians on the part of lighter skinned Indians. Indian racism is
not always a question of Indian nationalism. There are many families that would
welcome a White daughter or son-in-law with open arms, but who would not accept
an African spouse for their child.

It’s not clear how the non-racialism cultivated in the Black
Consciousness and trade union movements can be returned to the fore of civic
life in contemporary South Africa. It still exists, of course, in the
commitment, lives and work of many individuals. And it certainly still exists
in some social movement politics. But the only thing that really seems to bind
South Africans together these days is consumerism and the worship of bling.
Consumerism can tie the children of the elites together, but for the majority
who are not rich the culture of bling only compounds their sense of marginality
and even desperation. The fact that so many young people are desperate is a
real threat to nation building. There is always a grave risk that this
desperation can be exploited by ethnic entrepreneurs hiding their fundamental
complicity with racism behind the languages of culture, minority rights or
even, on occasion, the left.

The turn to a politics of racial and ethnic chauvinism leave
no space for the children of the Indian working class and the poor in general.
No doubt the same is true for Coloured and White youth. For those of us who
remain committed to non-racialism it is time to return to the trenches of
struggle.

Frantz Fanon

1925 - 1961

This Blog

This blog contains resources directly related to Frantz Fanon's life and work, the secondary literature on Fanon and other resources useful for engaging Fanon's ideas here and now. Some of what is here comes from, or relates to, a particular set of ongoing discussions around Fanon's work in Grahamstown.